Zipped

by Laura McNeal

  “Driving,” Maurice said. “Out and about. Maybe to Green Lakes.”

  “We can put the dough in the refrigerator,” Janice said, looking hopefully at Lisa. When she saw the look on Lisa’s face, Janice said, “Or you can stay here, Leeze, and bake them. My mom won’t care.”

  Which is what she did, uncomfortably. Janice brushed her hair, applied honey-apricot lip gloss, and hopped down the steps behind Maurice. The two of them got into his car and Janice, before shutting the door, waved cheerfully. Watching them go made Lisa feel like Janice’s mother. She had to resist yelling, “Be careful!”

  Lisa put the cookies in the oven, still feeling motherish. She sat down on the sofa and tucked her toes between the cushions. Her Rockets’ Red Glare nail polish was chipped. She nibbled an index cuticle and looked out the window at the meaningful apartment. The sun was getting that gold look, and the trees, filling out now with feathery leaves, were almost transparent in the horizontal light. The motherish feeling dissipated and she sat very still, inhaling the hot cookie smells, aware that she was expecting something and that expectancy was almost as delicious as eating. Soon a car containing two missionaries, two leather-bound Bibles, a street map of Jemison, and the possibility of sin would roll up and park in full sight of the Bledsoes’ window.

  Then suddenly she wasn’t just waiting. The car appeared as it had appeared in her mind: the crimped hood, the white shirts, the twin bodies in their seat belts. She heard the dim kachunking of a car door and Elder Keesler unfolded his long body from the tiny car. Lisa’s heartbeat sped wildly. Maybe you shouldn’t go over there, she thought, but even as she was thinking this, she was back in the kitchen, sliding warm cookies onto a paper plate that said, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

  It was Elder Keesler who answered the door. “Hi,” he said, surprised and happy, Lisa thought, to see her there. Then something else crossed his face. Confusion, maybe. He didn’t step back to let her in.

  “Um, Elder Pfingst was beat,” he said, opening the door a bit wider, but still not stepping back. She noticed his stockinged feet. “He’s lying down right now.” He nodded toward a bedroom door. Closed. Which meant that if she came in, technically they would be alone. Technically, unchaperoned. Lisa realized her palms were sweating.

  “Oh!” she said. “Well, I was just going to drop these off, really.”

  “Chocolate chip?” Elder Keesler asked, leaning over to lift up the foil and peek in.

  His forehead was white and peaceful against the darkness of his cropped black hair. “Yep,” she said stupidly. “Chocolate . . . chip.” She wasn’t normally so awkward, but being with him made her stammer. “So why don’t I just leave them?” she said. “That way when Elder Pfingst feels better, you can reciprocate. Like with his girlfriend’s cookies. Not that this is the same.” She was crimson now, and so was his forehead.

  “No, I get it,” he said.

  “Well, okay,” Lisa said. She held the plate out, and he took them.

  “And it is kind of the same, isn’t it?” he asked.

  She looked up again, and met his eyes, which were lit up, somehow, by the goldness in the street.

  “Yes,” she said, no longer feeling stupid, flushed now with a happier, riverlike sensation.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll see you next Sunday, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Right.” She was backing away now. “At church.”

  She turned around, waved, and crossed the gold, long-shadowed street. The little girl on the swings, Lisa noticed, was no longer there.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sunday Drive

  When Maurice and Janice pulled away from Home Park Gardens, Janice did what she always did when she was nervous. She fingered the smooth blunt ends of her long hair, separating the strands and rolling them slightly between her fingertips. Then she pressed the edges against her lips. Finally Maurice said, “So does Doyle live with you, or what?”

  Janice made an awkward laugh. “Sometimes it seems like it.”

  Maurice didn’t say anything, which made Janice feel as if she had to. “There’s a Mormonoid missionary who lives across the street from me. Brother Keester, I call him. Brother Keester kayoed Lisa with his smoldering eyes and keen Bible knowledge.” She hoped Maurice might smile at this. He didn’t. “Anyway, that’s why we were baking chocolate chip cookies. I guess cookies are for Mormons what making out is for normal people.”

  Another silence stretched out, and then Janice heard something strange. A cat, she was pretty sure of it—the gravelly stretched-out yowww of a cat. She turned to a cardboard box on the backseat. “That a cat?”

  Maurice smiled. “Definitely sounded like one.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Belongs to a lady I know.”

  Janice had the feeling this was a signal to stop asking questions, but she couldn’t help herself. “What are you doing with it?”

  Maurice’s smile turned mysterious. “You’ll see.”

  Janice glanced again at the box. “What’s its name?”

  “Harriet.”

  Who would name a cat Harriet? Janice thought, and then she said it.

  Maurice paused. “A lady named Lillian Kinderman,” he said. Then, “She used to live in Village Greens.”

  So when he’d said lady, he meant old lady. Janice felt a strange slackening of apprehension and stared out at the passing street. It was almost four o’clock, the late and laziest part of a spring Sunday afternoon so beautiful it made the people on stoops and bicycles look richer, happier, younger, almost. On the wider streets, Maurice kept the Honda in the right-hand lane, moving along at a crawl. He sat back in his seat with exaggerated relaxation, one arm stretched over the back of her seat without touching her. Janice thought to say, “I like your car.”

  Maurice nodded with evident pleasure, and words began to flow. “Yeah, well, first thing I did was slam it, then the limo tint—I wanted to do it all around but the cops are on that like flies on shitowski—and then the sixteen-inch rims.”

  “What’s slamming it mean?”

  “Lowering it.” Maurice grinned. “What planet you been living on?”

  Janice would’ve said Planet Earth, and that’s confirmed whereas with you the jury’s out, but she hadn’t figured out Maurice’s sense of humor yet. Maybe he didn’t have one. She said, “What’s that yellow stuff on the side?”

  “Body kit. Whattaya think of the offset color?”

  She wasn’t sure which was the offset color, but she said, “I like it a lot.” Maurice seemed pleased. “Then I replaced the taillights with clear corners and put on the loud exhaust. That’s a seven-inch tip.”

  Janice nodded. She had no idea what he was talking about. She’d heard guys talk about trunk woofers, so she said, “How big are the trunk woofers?”

  “Twelve inch,” Maurice said proudly. “Wanna hear ’em?”

  “You know what? I don’t even like that loud stuff. It’s like it’s all bass.” She watched his expression and realized she was scared what he would think.

  But he shrugged. “Yeah, me neither.”

  Janice was surprised at her own relief. Her smile brightened. “It’s like some weird advertisement for yourself.”

  Maurice considered it. “I don’t know about that. To me, it’s just distracting. I like, you know, to feel the car.”

  They both fell silent, and a few minutes later he made a couple of turns and said, “Mind if I make a stop?”

  She didn’t need to answer. He was already pulling into the parking lot of a place whose sign said COTTAGEWOOD and then in smaller letters, FLEXIBLE ASSISTED LIVING. “This a rest home or something?” she said.

  Maurice looked at her. “Actually, it’s more of a big tomb where the not-quite-dead get to not-quite-live for a while before they die and make it official.” He grinned. “Wanna come in and see?”

  She said she’d just wait in the car, thank you, but after she watched Maurice take the cardboard box from the car and set it int
o one of the tiny low-walled patios, then head for the main entrance, she grew curious and caught up with him at the check-in desk. He was there to visit Lillian Kinderman, he told the woman at the desk. Janice signed in, too, and a few minutes later they were knocking on a door at the end of a wide, carpeted corridor.

  “I’m decent,” a voice said from within, and once they were inside, a petite, white-haired woman looked on Maurice—and then Janice—with what seemed like genuine pleasure. “I knew you’d be coming today. I felt it in my old bones.”

  The apartment was tiny but complete—bed, kitchenette, bathroom, and sitting area, where Mrs. Kinderman had been watching an old black-and-white movie, which she now remoted off, and made a motion as if to rise from her chair. “Can I make you tea?”

  “Naw,” Maurice said. “We’re good.” He turned. “This is Janice. I found her this afternoon eating raw cookie dough.”

  Mrs. Kinderman smiled at her. “She looks pretty healthy all the same,” she said, and held out her hand, which Janice took, but Mrs. Kinderman didn’t shake it, she just held it tightly for a few seconds.

  Maurice had slipped out the patio door and returned now with the cardboard box. When he opened it, a black cat popped out and without any hesitation at all crossed the room and jumped into the lap of Mrs. Kinderman, whose hands began running along the cat’s back in long calm strokes. “Oh, Harry,” she said.

  The cat was purring now, a thick throaty purr that made Mrs. Kinderman laugh. “She’s not very ladylike, is she?”

  A minute or so later, the cat rose and began kneading Mrs. Kinderman’s stomach with her paws.

  Maurice said, “I can get her to purr, but I can’t get her to do that.”

  Mrs. Kinderman said, “Harriet knows you’re a good boy, but she also knows you aren’t me.” She went on to tell them about Ginny, the woman who cleaned her apartment every other day. “She comes in here and within the minute she’s sneezing and leaking and wheezing and very suspicious of why. ‘There a cat in here, Lillian?’ she says, and doesn’t even wait for me to deny it. ‘What’s this black hair here? What’s that from? You know there’s no cats allowed here.’ I say that I certainly do know that cats aren’t allowed, and what is she accusing me of?” Mrs. Kinderman smiled at Janice. “I give her a good weekly tip. She’s not going to tattle.”

  When thirty minutes had passed, Maurice rose. “Better go,” he said.

  Mrs. Kinderman whispered something in the cat’s ear, then slid it back into its box. She took Maurice’s hand and when he leaned down, she kissed his forehead. “Such a good boy,” she said in a murmuring voice, and then held out her hand to Janice, who took it and then—she didn’t know what else to do—leaned down and felt the old woman’s soft kiss on her forehead, too. “And such a good girl,” she said.

  Back outside, Maurice reached over the patio wall and retrieved the boxed cat. Mrs. Kinderman, watching from the patio door, waved one last time.

  “Okay, then,” Maurice said when they were back in the car.

  “She’s nice,” Janice said, and she meant it.

  “Yeah.” He glanced at her patio window as they pulled away. “She thinks she’s coming back to Village Greens, but I don’t think so. You wouldn’t know it, but she’s had a couple of strokes, so her daughters stashed her here where there are doctors and stuff.”

  Janice asked how he’d met her, and Maurice explained. When he was done, almost as an afterthought, he said, “You should taste her pot roast.” Then, “Which reminds me, I’m hungry. You hungry?”

  She laughed. “Pretty much all the time.”

  At a drive-through window a girl handed a bag of hamburgers and fries to Maurice, who handed them to Janice and said, “How ’bout we go to Green Lakes and eat them there?”

  Janice thought that sounded good and said so. Green Lakes was a huge sprawl of a park where people went as much for privacy as recreation. As they swung out onto the highway, Janice peered into the bag and was pulling out a fry when Maurice said, “Ho, girly, not in the car.”

  Janice grinned unsurely. “You’re joking, right?”

  Maurice smiled. “Nope. Actual rule.”

  Janice thought of trying to talk her way into just one harmless teeny-tiny fry to ward off serious deep-fat deprivation but decided against it. She said, “You should see my mom’s car. You could survive in there for a week just on the scraps.”

  Maurice nodded and said, “There you go.” They drove into the hushed chamber of the park. It was like driving into a green cocoon. Picnickers’ cars lined the parking lot, and Maurice’s tricked-out Honda was picking up stares from other cars, stares Janice liked.

  Maurice said, “The food rule was my father’s rule, too. That, anyhow, was what my mother told me. She said he picked it up in Japan. She said the Nipponese never ate in their cars, and their cars were perfect.”

  Janice nodded and wondered whether Nipponese was a real word and if it wasn’t, whether it was racist. Then she decided the only thing she didn’t like about Maurice’s Honda was the window tint. It kept people from seeing her riding around in this cool car.

  Maurice said, “My father died never having a new car. I plan to have one by my twenty-first birthday.”

  “Sounds like money to me,” Janice said, because she couldn’t help but wonder where it would come from.

  Maurice must’ve sensed this. He smiled and said, “Yeah, well, I’ve got a few irons in the fire.”

  A second or two passed before Janice said, “My mother couldn’t give a shit about cars.” Janice almost never said shit, but it felt good saying it now—it made her feel somehow older and freer. “But both my dads gave a shit about cars.”

  Maurice tossed her a quick amused look. “Dads?”

  “Dad One and Dad Two. They came and they went. Usually in brand-new cars.” She remembered something. “My mother always tells people that on the highway of life her ex-husbands ran a lot of people off the road.”

  Maurice grinningly nodded. “Well, sometimes you gotta free up the lanes for the serious drivers.”

  Janice wasn’t sure she understood this, but laughed as if she did. She push-buttoned down her window.

  “Pass a little gas?” Maurice said, but she could see he was joking. So at least he had some sense of humor.

  “It’s just such a nice day, I wanted to let the outside in.” She also wanted to let the outside eyes in. Deeper in the park, when they got near the water, Maurice had to stop behind a Suburban that was being loaded with trikes. While Maurice waited impatiently, tapping the wheel with his ring, she spotted the Jeep Cherokee of Brad Pembrook. Brad himself gave her a long look, and she almost had to laugh. This was fun. She scooched down a little in her seat and sat on her hands, which she knew would make her breasts stand out a little, and until Maurice could squeal around the Suburban, Brad Pembrook looked down from his Jeep, checking her out.

  Maurice, on the other hand, seemed weirdly indifferent to her, which she wasn’t really used to. And the fact that he wasn’t checking her out made her want him to check her out. But Maurice was quiet and stayed quiet, letting the slow scan of his eyes pick up everything about other cars, other drivers, other kids on the streets, everything, in fact, but her. It made for a strange stillness within the car, and when Maurice’s pager suddenly chirped, Janice almost jumped.

  Maurice glanced at the number, then flipped open the center console and pulled a cell phone from its holster. It was the same kind of phone Janice’s mother had, and she noticed Maurice hit speed dial 3.

  “Yeah?” Maurice said, low, and then for a long time he just listened. Then he said, “Okay,” and hung up.

  Janice had the feeling it was a girl. Maybe, for all she knew, his girlfriend. “That your mother?” she said, going for a joke.

  Maurice didn’t smile. “Might as well be,” he said, and turned around, leaving the park more quickly than he’d entered it. “Small detour,” he said. Janice was annoyed, disappointed, and hungry, watching the leafy
greenness and the picnic tables pass away.

  The small detour turned out to be driving all the way to some decrepit street downtown. She was starving, absolutely starving. The cookie dough was going to her head, making her feel faint. What was it? Six o’clock? Six-thirty? Maurice pulled up in front of an unmarked store. “Be right back,” he said. “And keep the doors locked. This ain’t the best neighborhood.”

  He went to a door that had about twelve locks on it. He pushed a button and said something brief into a speaker. A few seconds later the door opened—she couldn’t see who opened it— and Maurice went inside.

  Janice reached into the brown bag and ate, very carefully, three French fries. She started to eat a fourth, but something stopped her. She put it back and carefully refolded the top of the bag. She glanced at the door into which Maurice had disappeared. Nothing. She wiped the grease off her fingers, popped open the console, glanced again at the door, then quickly pulled out Maurice’s phone and speed dialed 3. She was pretty sure a girl would answer, but she was wrong. On the first ring, a firm male voice said, “Jocko’s Unsurpassed Security, is this an emergency and if not how can I direct your call?”

  Janice hung up at once, then quickly returned the phone to the console. She pulled the cardboard box forward and let out the cat, who sniffed around, then settled pleasantly into Janice’s lap. After a few strokes the cat began to purr and kept purring. Janice glanced at the storefront door—still closed—then looked around the street. Maurice was right. It wasn’t the nicest neighborhood. What had looked like two plastic bags of trash on the opposite sidewalk was, she suddenly realized, somebody who’d passed out on the pavement and was now slowly coming to life. He was wearing a Hefty bag over his clothes as some kind of a coat. Once he was standing, he turned to face the wall. Peeing, Janice suddenly realized, and she turned quickly away.

  On this side of the street, an old woman was moving haltingly in Janice’s direction. When Maurice emerged from the storefront, the woman followed him toward the car. As Maurice approached, Janice reached over to flip the lock, but the old woman arrived just as he was opening the door. Her cheeks and nose were red and veiny, and her face seemed loosely gathered around her tiny mouth. “Two dollars soup money’s all I need, friend,” she said to Maurice. “Just two bucks.” When she smiled there was nothing but gums.